


i^ 



^^l 



fs ADDRESS 



TO THE 



\}9irpyal^ InGligo ^oeiety 



or" 



Georgetown, South Carolina, 

One Hundred and Fifty-Third Anniversary, 



BTT 



HENRY D. CAPERS, 



OB' 



CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA. 



• ••••• 



• • • • • 



• • • • • 



Oaee. 




Glass. 
Book 









ADDRESS 



TO THE 



\Birpya^ Indigo (goeiety 



OIF 



Georgetown^ South Carolina, 

One Hundred and Fifty-Third Anniversary, 

HENRY D. CAPERS, 

CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA. 



RICHMOND, VA.: 

West, Johxston ife Co. . . 007 Makx Street. 
1894. 






^y>3 3/3 



ZJ 



Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Wynyaw— 
Indigo Society : 

There are occasions in the history of all peoples recurring 
with each return of an anniversary which are illustrative 
of their peculiar virtues of civilization and in their dis- 
tinctive features giving marked expression to their per- 
sonal characteristics. Whether it be in the ceremonials 
instituted by conventional usage to commemorate some 
achievement in art or in arms ; whether it be to recognize 
the birthday of an individual or of a nation ; whether to 
preserve the record of personal virtue or a mere incident 
in the history of a community however instituted and for 
whatever purpose recognized, these occasions are never 
without interest, never without suggestive thoughts, 
never without instructive lessons to those who compre- 
hend and would perpetuate their historic import. 

History, while made up from the actions of men, is 
better read and best preserved in the public recognition of 
the anniversaries commemorative of these actions. The 
monuments erected by man in every age and among all 
people are but silent witnesses attesting a history that 
succeeded them, the mute testators of personal or of na- 
tional achievements which had preceded their erection, the 
dumb evidences of facts preserved through traditions, per- 
petuated in recurring ceremonials instituted before these 
foundation stones were laid. 

A people without an anniversary occasion, without a 
fete or a festival, without a single ceremonial institution, 
is a people without a history. 



Whether it be to eulogize personal courage or a national 
triumph — whether to extol individual virtues or the 
glories of a State, there has always been among all civil- 
ized, and even among some so-called uncivilized people, 
some occasion, which, as a link in the great chain of 
human events connects the past with the present. 

Such an occasion, my friends, brings us together here 
to-day. 

We are here to recognize and to pay proper respect 
to an anniversary day, inaugurated by our forefathers 
in the colonial days of Carolina, when men and women, 
worthy of the name, were establishing the virtues of Eu- 
ropean civilization among the wilds of the western conti- 
nent. 

For one hundred and fifty-three years you have with a 
vestal fidelity nourished the flame kindled upon this altar 
and with but brief intervals, made by the discord of war, 
year after year you have come to this colonial Mecca with 
a most commendable zeal and have cherished the sacred 
fire, which I find brightly burning to-day, even amid 
the turmoil and confusion of a period of so-called progress 
in civilization. 

Permit me to express to you and this venerable society, 
Mr. President, my most sincere congratulations. I have 
no language adequate to express the gratitude I feel in 
being permitted to meet with you to-day, to join in the 
gratulations or share with you in the sorrows which our 
reveries naturally provoke. 

On such an occasion, while there is much in these sur- 
roundings, Mr. President, to inspire in me a song of 
thanksgiving; while my congratulations to you, my 
friends, are sincerely given, and are justly provoked by 



the circumstance of our meeting to-day, and while it is 
really restful to me to linger in these sweet words, yet I 
am reminded that you expect from me an address that 
will express something more than the mere platitudes of 
an occasion. 

By the bright light of your own altar, the long vista of 
the past is so well illumined, that we find without difficul- 
ty much to admire, to charm even to poetic inspiration, 
in the history of the men and women who have made the 
glories of our past civilization ; but. sir, w^hile this is un- 
doubtedly true, I cannot find in the most powerful reflec- 
tor completeness enough to enable me to throw from 
this beacon a searching ray that will penetrate the dark, 
shadowy and ominous future into which we or our pos- 
terity must soon move and live or be lost in a fearful 
maelstrom of civil revolution. As the only hope I can 
have, or that to my mind appears based upon a sensible, 
comprehension of the laws that have governed the evolu- 
tion of civilization in the past, or that must govern it in 
the future, comes from the manly and womanly virtues of 
our ancestors, I would turn to these and ask your pa- 
tience, while here and there, as I turn backward the light, 
I may discover and offer to your admiration the strength,' 
the graces and the completeness of those who have trans- 
ferred to your keeping the sacred flame of this ancient 
altar. 

I am aware, Mr. President, that it is not considered 
either wise or expedient in the highways, of these days of 
mechanical thought and mechanical action, to regard the 
past, or to venerate, or to honor its experience, other 
than as a relic, a sort of a historical ''bric-a-brac" for the 
child of a new era, to regard as a toy or to make reference 



to as a flippant jest, or the man of accidents and profits 
to rest a claim in for his gain or for his respectability. 

Yet, nevertheless, I find these, as I reach my three score 
years of experience, all that is with me worthy of honor, 
of admiration or veneration. 

These A^oun^ people, these boys and girls, who your so- 
ciety, with a fostering care, worthy of the genius that in- 
stituted it, send out year after year into the currents of 
life to float with its drift, will reach one day a period 
in life when, like myself, they will stop on the way and 
turn backward the wonderful kaleidoscope of their mem- 
ories. Happily for them if they should, in doing so, renew 
their virtues of manhood or womanhood at this honored 
place. 

Within the past two or three decades there has become 
manifest a spirit of unrestfulness growing year after year 
in strength, until now it has grown into a turbulent tide, 
moving organized bodies of men hither and thither in 
search for that they cannot find, hoping for that they 
cannot realize, drifting, wherever, to whatever current 
drawn by the shrewdness, the cupidity, or the unhallowed 
ambition of mdividual gain or of political partisan 
benefits. 

We vie w^ these movements from a distance, but we cannot 
view them with unconcern. The beating of these restless 
waves against the breakwaters erected by our ancestors 
to preserve the genius of the government they have trans- 
mitted to us, comes now as but the sensitive touch we 
must ever feel while bound to the people of the northern 
States by a kinship of benefits or of suffering inseparable, 
because we are now united to them, as a part of the same 
government, by a tie of iron, and we are of necessity* 



whether willingly or unwillingly, a part of the vSame gov- 
ernment. This bond ot union was once stronger than 

/ the best of steel, stronger than mere benefits and more 
exalted them a consideration of profits. It was once the 
love knot of a pure, unselfish and devoted patriotism, ad- 
justed on our part by Jefferson, Patrick Henry, your own 
great man Lynch, and approved by Rutledgeand Pickney, "V^ 
and hallowed by the ordeals, the sufferings and the 
achievements of a conflict, for the rights, the liberties and 
the immunities of a restful citizenship, under the genius of 

. the great chart of English constitutional government. 

But yet, Mr. President, and my good friends, notwith- 
standing this bond of union wnth the north men has been 
cancelled on its face by their own acts; notwithstand- 
ing the love knot that once bound them to us is even at 
this late day without a complete readjustment, we can- 
not but sympathize with our quondam friends who are 

/ now invaded with an army of restless, if not desperate 
men, who have no ties to bind them to a home, no hal- 
lowed place of love at which to rest their wearied ener- 
gies, renew their spirits with the nispiration of manly as- 
sociations, or encourage an honest sentiment of patriot- 
ism, but who, repeating a dark chapter in the history of 
the past, come down in hordes upon our American Rome, 
and, with impious hands of Gallic barbarity, would reach 
for the unctuous beards of our Senators, defy the prece- 
dent and the laws of civilization and riot in the licentious 
orgies of anarchy among the monuments and the memo- 
ries of our history, and at the very altars of our constitu- 

/ tional government. 

Such scenes as are now being enacted along the high- 
ways of commerce in the northern States of our American 



8 

Union would have been impossible with the men who 
founded your institutions, and whose every act and ex- 
pression of citizenship was originated, influenced and 
made under the conserving genius of a civilization that 
had as its strongest and its best inspiration the love of 
home; impossible, because there was nothing so un- 
certain or contingent in their industrial pursuits 
as to alienate these affections, destroy these attach- 
ments, and to send them out to drift aimlessly on the 
great ocean of life. 

Our fathers were men of faith— a pure, simple and sensi- 
ble faith in their own purposes, because they knew and 
felt these to be honest ; faith in their neighbors, because 
they found them to be in all things upright, candid 
and sincere; faith in a God of righteousness, whose 
laws in nature they conformed to in their acts of 
worship, in their service of labor, and in their methods 
of life, without seeking to conform those laws to 
their selfish ends, their ambitions or to any uncertain 
theories of moral or social obligations. Hence they were 
not men of isms or schisms. They never sought to force a 
result to suit their personal benefits or partisan schemes, 
either in affairs temporal or spiritual, but were content 
when these results were the effects or the consequences 
of well established and legitimate laws — laws approved 
by long experience and tested by practical observation— 
to yield a cheerful acquiescence and accept the result as 
the sequence of an irresistible logic. For these reasons 
they reverenced the truth, and abhorred a falsehood; for 
these reasons they applauded all manly acts of courage or 
devotion, and despised a moral coward not less than they 
condemned the braggart and the bully. They were men who 



did right because they loved righteousness; they were men 
who would condemn the wrong because they had the 
courage of their convictions, and feared not to express 
them. 

They were men who were just and equitable in all things 
and in the smallest affairs of life were as careful and as 
thorough as it was possible to be. 

Hence their lives were the constant reflex of the most 
honorable citizenship and in the exercise of adminstra- 
tive authorit\^, whether in the domestic relations of life or 
in the affairs of municipal or of state authority, they wove 
the perfect fabric of a secure, a peaceful and a happy gov- 
ernment. 

Hence they were men who were content to wait the 
growth of a great tree from the small mustard seed plant- 
ed in the faith of individual or of collective effort and 
nourished with care and encouraged to a full fruition by 
an unselfish and devoted discharge of duty. 

They wove into the tapestries of their characters the 
richest colorings by the patience of the smallest stitches 
and with the finest fabrics of truth and the loftiest virtues 
of manhood and womanhood. 

Thus have I endeavored, Mr. President, to bring from 
the past the virtues which have made the early history of 
your community, which have reflected their goodness and 
their strength iipon the history of our State, and to pre- 
sent them to the youth of this day as the most complete 
ideal of manhood, the best offering I could make at this 
altar. 

In my ramble backward through this vista of time, I find 
ever growing stronger, ever growing purer, ever getting 
brighter, a personal integrity of character, a manly indi- 



10 

vidualism, a generous recognition of vsocial relations, an 
incorruptible devotion to principle, a reverence for honor- 
able age, a respect for constituted authoritv, Jin uncor- 
rupted and incorruptible integrity, v^diich I must sa^^ in 
all candor to you, my friends, is not equalled in this 
guilded day of our so-called American progress. 

Do not now after this declaration judge me as being 
pessimistic either in spirit or in expression, either be- 
cause of my associations with those or with that which 
have about them, the evidences of antiquity, or because I 
have had the winters of years to chill the ardors of m\' 
youth. 

There is much that is good in the present, much that is 
good in the future to come, but neither the present nor the 
future can claim any of this goodness, for you or for me 
or for posterity, except as it has received it by the impress 
of the goodness of the past. 

Eliminate from our moral character the virtues of true 
citizenship, the integrity, the patient endurance, the in 
dustry. the frugalit}^ the temperate zeal, the lofty pa- 
triotism, and the noble purposes in life that we have here 
set before us in the history of this society as the charac- 
teristics of your ancestors, and what more are we? What 
more can vou be (in this year of grace) but recruits for 
some legion of anarchist, or the aimless, shiftless, pliant 
tools of juggling politicians? 

And first, then, allow me, my friends, to call the atten- 
tion of these young men and boys who are gathered at 
your call, to this altar, to that simplicity of honest citizen- 
ship so beautifully illustrated in the history of our fathers. 
In doing so I desire to make an emphasis upon the term 
I have employed to qualify my honest citizenship— 



11 

SIMPLICITY. 



Their WcH^s were direct and straightforward; no dis- 
simmulation, no equivocation in speech, no duplicit\^ in 
action, but in all things open, frank, and sincere. Their 
statements were made in the simplicity of truth and their 
oljHgati()ns,even though orally made, were given, received 
and discharged with an inviolable fidelity that no bond 
could strengthen and no ass'-rance make more secure. 

There was nothing complex or mystical in their profes- 
sions or their ]:)ractices. No assumption of guise or of 
character, but in ^dl thev \^•ere or all the^^ desired to be 
there was a personalitv unmistakable, that fixed the merit 
of the man or the woman in all they said and all they 
did. Hence the}^ were known by their personal works 
and honored for their personal merits. And hence it is 
that all through this long vista of time their works do 
honor them. 

In their business affairs or industrial pursuits, they were 
earnest, judicious, persistent and courageous. Whether 
at the office, in the counting room, or in the field, there 
was an even tenor to their wav, that made the diapason 
of life's music full and sweet. 

There may be, to us of this age, a slowness in the move- 
ment, but with all the rapidity of our electric snap w^e 
have never yet brought to the heart or to the hearthstone 
more of real substantial joy than came surely, if it was 
slowly, to those who were willing to labor and to wait for 
the full fruition of their well-directed labor and manly 
purpose. 
They were men of forecast, who planned and worked, 



12 

lived and hoped, iio<: alone for themselves, but for 
posterity. 

Their unwearied energies met the opposition of savage 
hosts, cleared away the tangled growth of a primitive 
forest, levied rivers, drained our swamp lands, and 
brought from a willing, fruitful soil the richest returns. 

To-day the grateful shade of their grand avenues invites 
to a restful repose and leads to homesteads and to insti- 
tutions of learning, to temples of Christian worship and 
to retreats for the unfortunates that have survived the 
ravages of time, and the vandalism of invading armies; 
all these attesting tlieir unselfish devotion to the duties 
and a just appreciation of the obligations of a worthy 
and a noble citizenship. 

Attached to the soil by a right of ownership, the\^ used 
this right not in the wantonness of that spirit which de- 
sired only a speedy and a speculativ^e return, but content 
to receive the blessings and the reward of patient labor, 
they returned by judicious appliances year after year, as 
the harvest was garnered, all that was necessary to main- 
tain the vigor and productive capacitv upon which they 
had so liberally drawn. 

These men reaped where they had sown. At their 
homes and about their firesides there were many sweet 
associations, many endearments, that come alone to those 
who rest under their own vines and enjo3^ the fruit from 
a tree of their own planting. Hence they were patriots, 
and they were the fathers and the mothers of patriots, 
There is, there has ever been, there will ever be, the highest, 
best and purest expressions of patriotism among those 
whose love of country springs from their attachment to 
the soil, to some fixed abode, w^here the hallowed associa- 



13 

tions of childhood, youth and mature age all center them- 
selves at a sacred altar, to which the memor_y of a 
mother's love and of a father's benediction lead the soul 
of man, by an intuition he cannot resist, on and up to a 
worship more sincere than can be induced by the cold for- 
mulas of cosmopolitan usage. — I desire, Adr. President, to 
ask the patience of my audience, and especially the atten- 
tion of the young men and hoys who are to become at no 
distant day the successors of those who hold in their 
keeping the sacred trust you are so well discharging, 
while I endeavor to give emphasis to the declaration just 
made. 

While it is true, my young friends, that to some extent 
the circumstances that surround you dift'er from those in 
which your ancestors lived and labored, yet allow me to 
assure you that these circumstances are not so changed as 
to prevent your achievements in the future from being 
worth\^ of comparison with those that come to you, 
through. your country's history, as the legacy of a noble 
posterity. 

There is no law of evolution, physical or moral, that 
has changed the conditions under which these characters 
were made or that gives to you or to others some other 
and surer formula by which you may hope to achieve 
success, secure the honors of a true and noble life, or the 
emoluments and rewards that were and yet are given 
by a vouth of labor to the blessinos of old age— as the 
highest, best and only true reward which is to be reached 
by man in this world — the rew^ard of a conscious sense of 
self respect, which outlives all misfortune, the reward o^ 
judicious and well directed labor to which nothing is de- 
nied and nothing worth having can be acquired, the re- 



14 

ward of a faith in God, and an implicit, restful trust in His 
providences, a recognition of His divine laws as a rule, 
and as an inspiration of action, which brought to them 
unuterable bliss. "As life with them went out, as sets 
the morning star ; behind no darkened West, or amid the 
tempest of the skies, but that melted away into thelife and 
the light of an immortal heaven." 

These were the men, my friends, who have made the 
brightest chapters in the history of South Carolina, and 
have given to you the glorious legacy of the past. 

These are they who the youth of this State can best 
honor by practicing their virtues ^and emulating their ex- 
amples. 1 do not make this as an idle declaration, a mere 
sentiment to entertain you with, or because I am brought 
before you, my young friends, (by your society) as a liv- 
ing evidence of the truth of cdl I have said to you. Before 
these vestals and at this altar, I do not come as a mere 
advocate, but to this hallowed shrine, you have so faith- 
fully preserved, I come as an humble penitent. 

I am expressing myself to you at your most hallowed 
place on your most honored occasion, as one who has 
been through the swineherds and knows how the 
husks of deceit, satisfy the demands of the soul of 
manhood. I am speaking to you from a place to 
which there come to mv conscious manhood the whisper- 
ings of a memorv that binds me to your noblest civiliza- 
tion, I am lead to you by a chain whose links were 
forged in no mere worship of expedienc\^; I am reaching 
for the hands of these older men as for that of elder 
brothers, and I am appealing to the sensibilities of those 
who are to make the history of our country's future as 
I w^ould to mv own children. 



15 

In doing so I am not parading the grave clothes of by- 
o-one ijenerations, I am but honoring virtues that have no 
tomb, and that want no resurrection. call, but that are 
living now and will live forever because they were of im- 
mortal birth and are to remain the standards of excel- 
lence among men through the ages to come that are to 
endure and to triumph over every difficulty and over every 
antagonism until civilization shnll be lost in a chaos of un- 
restrained impulse and the throne and thesceptreofhuman 
reason be swayed by some insane demon of discord. 

I am not before you as a Socrates to chide some restless 
and ambitious Glauco or to encourage the Sophists to 
send the hemlock of their hatred and condemnation to 
those who may disagree with me in theory, or rebuke 
them in their mad ravings, but I am here to rest my own 
soul in honoring with you the memories of the men who 
were not less than Socrates in being the masters of their 
own passions, and who were wiser than the Sophists be- 
cause they pi-eferred the growth and commercial value of 
indigo to the poison of hemlock. 

If there were men in those days I am honest enough, I 
am yet truthful enough, I am grateful encugh and not 
ashamed to say to you that there were women in those 
days; women who advised, who counseled, who prayed, 
and who hoped, and who worked, and whose sweet, hon- 
est, winsome ways of a pure, and an honest womanhoo d, 
not only CO ordinatcd the vanity, the arrogance, and the 
assumption of their liege Lords, but who very often en- 
abled them to express an acknowledgment of and 
and an admiration for the virtues to which I have asked 
your attention, my young friends, in this morning of 
1894. Prav allow me to recall their precious memories and 



16 

their noble works. In his most interesting and instructive 
review of the early history of South Carolina, Mr. Courte- 
nay presents the following testimonial, as one of the 
many precious and lovely flowers he has so well collected 
and has so gracefully woven into the chapters of the Year 
Book of Charleston for 1883: 

"As the colon}^ was indebted to the intelligent use of a 
chance opportunity availed of by Governor Thomas 
Smith for the introduction of rice culture, which so 
rapidly supplied cheap food for both man and beast, and 
added so largeh^ to the wealth of the people, so fifty years 
thereafter it came about that a young lady, by her intel- 
ligent observation and diligence, was the originator of 
Indigo culture in Colonial Carolina." 

You are familiar with the name of Lucas, or you should 
be, m^^ dear young friends. It has been associated with 
the best works and the most worthy achievements of the 
men who have made yourpast history, but in the eulogies 
and tributes we ma}^ pay to manhood's achievements, 
we must not, we cannot forget the women who made the 
name and the fame of these family histories, we often re- 
cur to with pride and venerate with a commendable re- 
spect. 

While I may be reading to you an oft respeated story, 
pray indulge me, as from Mr. Courtenay's admirable 
collection, I select and present to you for your apprecia- 
tion this single flow^er, so well preserved by him. 

"In 1741-42, Colonel Luc^s, owning a plantation near 
the confluence of Wappoo c/reek and Stono River, where 
his family were then residing, encouraged his daughter 
Eliza's fondness for planting, by sending her seeds and 
fruits to be tested in this new English Colony. Among 



17 

other contributions of this sort was some indigo seed as 
a subject of experiment. The record shows that without 
particular information as to the season for sowing or the 
most desirable soil, she undertook the experiment of in- 
digo culture. The first seed was planted in March, and was 
destroyed by a frost; the next in April was cut down by 
worms, a third and later planting succeeded. Upon 
Colonel Lucas hearing of its growth he sent a Mr. Crom- 
well from the Island of Monserrat, one of the most health- 
ful and pleasant of the West India Islands, with a soil 
adapted to the growth of sugar, indigo, coffee and fruits, 
who was versed in indigo culture, and in the intricate 
process of its preparation for market, and gave him high 
wages to develop this new crop in Carolina. Under his 
direction the first indigo vats, built of brick, were erected 
on this plantation, and the first Carolina indigo made. 
It was of'jinferior quality, and this was attributable to 
the indigo maker, Mr. Cromwell, who was so impressed 
with the promise of this experiment as to give expression 
to regrets that he shouid have to do what he believed 
would certainly ruin a similar industry in his own land. 
He attempted to make a mystery of the work of prepara- 
tion, but Miss Lucas b3^ close observation got an msight 
into the complex process, which required fermentation 
by submerging the plants in cisterns of water, and a tedi- 
ous and continuous attention to many details of prepara- 
tion, and was subsequently rewarded by improved re- 
sults. 

In 174-4 the whole crop was saved for seed, and given 
away in small parcels to a great number of planters, and 
through this liberal action the growth of indigo became 
plentiful in the Colony. 



18 

So you perceive, my friends that you are indebted to a 
true woman, even for a part of the name of your society, 
and in this, as in other matters, that it was not the man 
alone, but that it was the woman as his helpmeet who was 
the real author and originator of blessings in the days of 
our fathers. 

I have no impulse given to my thought which would dis- 
honor the memories of the past with a fulsome laudation. 
I have no occasion here in which such would be either 
worthy of the men, who are the decendants and the repre- 
sentatives of the gentle, honest and true women who 
cheered the spirits, nerved the arms and encouraged the 
worthy ambitions and purposes of the men who made the 
colonial history of our country. I recall the love of a 
mother born and reared in your midst whose simple 
graces of womanhood cannot be adorned by any draperies 
of eulogy, and in doingso I honoryourown sacred loves by 
touching in tenderness the sweetest chord of that won- 
drous harp hidden in our finer natures by a God, who 
they honored and served in the purity and restfulness of a 
perfect faith. 

How pleasant it is thus to go back to the fountain source 
of the purest and sweetest, the noblest and best inspira- 
tions of life. 

It is indeed a gracious pleasure to linger in the sweet 
restfulness of these thoughts; but delightful as it is to me 
I must pass on to the consideration of matters that are 
features of the present period in our history, and that are 
affecting the interests of our social life and of necessity are 
influencing the civilization of the age in which we are 
living. 

The mechanical spirit of this period, so admirably por- 



19 



trayed by the great English Essayist, Mr. Carlisle, has 
reached the point of autocratic swa\' over the mrnds and 
the souls of men and women which Greek and Roman 
philosophy reached when there was substituted the law 
of Expediency (or the law of righteousness; a point at 
which we can begin to trace the decline of their civiliza- 
tions. 

The rule with our fathers was, that whatever was right 
was expedient; the rule now is that whatever is expedi- 
ent is the right thing to do. Of this expediency the single 
thought now is will the measure or the act result in good 
to me or success to my cause, if so move on to the result. 

Is it to reach some goal in public life on which youth 
has fixed a longing eye and to reach which ambition has 
plumed wings that haA^e been untried in a single flight 
beyond the campus of a college or the roof of an acad- 
emy, the youth drives on the phaeton steeds of his aspira- 
tion, reckless of who is injured or what is done by him- 
self or by his friends, until, at last he may find himself 
clothed w4th the drapery of a dignity he cannot w^ear 
with grace and invested with power which he is as apt to 
use to the injury of the state and to the distress of his 
people as otherwise. His expediency dishonors the most 
sacred ties of relationship and the most exalted virtues of 
citizenship. 

If he, who, by long service and established character 
and patriotic sacrifice and distinguished abilities is in his 
way, he must get out of the w^ay or be jostled and rudely 
pushed aside by the ''new era'' man of so called progress. 

Like the Spartan, under the rule of the Commonwealth 
of Lycurgus, he has a cave at some Taygetus, and there 
he or his confederates would throw the body of the one 



20 

who may have rebuked his temerity, or whose well-won 
honors he covets. He would deck his persons in the trap- 
pings of greatness if for sooth, he cannot transform his 
character into that of the great and the good man. 

To-day, my friends, one of the curses of our goodly land, 
if not its chief source of evil, is in the inordinate thirst for 
the pomp and display of official station and the greedy 
desire for the emoluments or for the power of executive 
authority. 

In the good and happy period of our history as a State, 
when Carolina laws were quoted in Europe and in Amer- 
ica as precedents, when her commercial interests and 
character was second to none in the civilized world, the 
custom was to select from among the people the best men, 
men whose characters were up to the standard, I have pre- 
sented to you, men of wisdom and probity and send them 
to our legislative hnlls, charged with the duty and pro- 
vided with the authority to take care of the people's in- 
terest. There these legislators, in a quiet, economical and 
prudent manner, discharged the trust confided to them by 
their neighbors, and returned to their homes to receive 
the respect and recognition which had made them to 
know that it was a high honor to serve the people in the 
service of the State. 

As in the legislative department of the State so was it in 
her judicial history, so was it in every official station and 
trust, all through the list of civil administration public 
and private, corporate or otherwise, down to the tip- 
stave of a court, all were selected for the goodness of their 
characters and their efficiency, and as long as they were 
faithful, as long as they honored Carolina, just so long 
did the old mother, the uncorrupted people honor them 



21 

As a result of this mania for office seeking nowadays 
we find that the basis of our material prosperty, the true 
foundation of our civilization— (to be found in the judi- 
cious cultivation of our fruitful soil)— is being overturned 
and a restless thriftless speculative spirit takes our young 
men every where from Washington City to the smallest 
cross road hustings, searching for some office, let its emol- 
uments be ever so snudl and its functions ever so limited. 

It is out of this class that the men come w^ho form com- 
binations and ''rings,'' combinations that bring down the 
most dignified office of the State to a plane of jobbery and 
to a dirty mart of barter and exchange. 

To these I would direct the youth of this audience as to 
an objective lesson, and let them see how^ degrading and 
debasing it is to become the purchased tool of a trading 
politician. 

I am aware, Mr. President, that there are a large 
number of very worthy young men whose mis- 
fortunes have made them too poor to own in fee 
the soil of our generous mother, and there are also 
others who are driven to other pursuits from a want of 
moral courage oftener than from any other cause. I am 
often brought in contact with these young men, and have 
often been asked to recommend them for almost every 
kind of clerkship, but rarely if ever, for the most inviting 
position on a farm. With most of these young men, 
this is not because judicious farming does not pay. lam 
sorry to say, young ladies, that in some instances it has 
been because your encouraging smiles are not for cheeks of 
tan. Too often the trim cut clothes of the socalled com- 
mercial tourist, whose display in making a flourish in our 
towns and villages allures with its spangle the youth, 



22 

who if he labors with the plow or hoe, hears ofteiier in- 
vidious comparisons than words of encouragement from 
the fair associates of his daily life. Again, if the youth- 
of the south does notov\n or may not inherit a landed 
property he finds that as a laborer he must meet upon a 
common plain a certain class, who. if not shackled as 
convicts, are at best belonging to a cast not considered re- 
spectable by the accidental nabobs of this guilded period. 
Hence he goes West to the plains of a freer competition or 
seeks some other occupation recognized as being more 
honorable b}^ the false sentiment of his weak minded as*- 
sociates. 

There are many noble exceptions, however, be it said to 
the honor of our manhood, where all these distinctions 
and differences, with regard to thedignity of pursuits and 
the uncertainty t^f agriculturcd labor, have not been ad- 
justed in the shade in philosophic disquisitions, but by the 
well-directed labor of the individual; when from the 
smallest beginnings the true man has stcadih^ moved up 
to a position of influence and m emoluments and in honors 
realizes the sure reward of his well-directed energies. We 
have many such men yet living in our State, and it is to 
their energies, their spirit and their representative man- 
hood that we owe to-day all of the prosperity and security 
that we enjoy in South Carolina. Ask such an one if 
farming pays, and he will point you wnth pride from his 
well-tilled fields and well-kept premises to his well-filled 
barns and restful home of jo^^ and peace. 

My friends, there is but one way that I can conceive of, 
only one honest common sense way of settling all of these 
paraded difSculties of the labor question in our country- 
Let every one go to work in earnest and with good judg~ 



23 

ment in his life chosen pursuit. Let fathers and mothers 
teach and illustrate by their example that the idler loung- 
ing about some public place, is a disgrace to true man- 
hood whether clothed in purple or not. Let our legislators 
not only enact, but let Executive Officers enforce in every 
town, village and hamlet wholesome laws punishing va- 
grancy as a crime. 

Let the man "of toil have the just reward due for his la- 
bor and give oh! fair daughter of our Sunny land ! give 
your sweetest smiles to those, who in manly graplings 
with a life of reality merit most your highest esteem. 

Young men — the sons and the successors of those who 
have made the grand history of your countrj^ — you have 
only to be worthj^ of your birthright, worthy of the man- 
hood that gave you a right to this heritage, that all along 
through this century has written the splendid history of 
Carolina, and as they have done so, may \^ou transmit to 
posterity the undimmed luster of their achievements 
and transmit to another generation the record of your 
worthy lives. 

My address Mr. President may appear prosaic to some 
and wanting in the flash of rhetorical pyrotechnics. If sol 
trust that my sincerity may be a sufficient excuse for the 
plainness of the language in which I express my deliber- 
ate convictions. 

It appears to me, sir, that the time has come in the his- 
tory of our state and country, when we need the convic- 
tions of honest minds and souls, and to commune with 
each other in the simplicity of the truth. 

If a single thought or expression I have presented to 
this assembly shall result in any good to but a single 



24 

youth who may be contemplating his future course inhfe, 
I shall not have spoken to 3'ou in vain. 

The generation of men to which I belong, will, in an- 
other decade or two have left this goodly heritage, this 
great old State and this home of our fathers, and will be 
gathered to them elsewhere. Our places are to be filled by 
others wdio may be better men than we have been, but 
they cannot be better than the fundamental principles of 
manhood and of womanhood to which Ihaveendeavored 
to call their attention. 

My young friends beyond the horrison of what may 
now appear to you to be a clear and boundless sky of 
beaut3^ there are storm clouds, and chilling winds which 
3^ou will be most fortunate if you do not (sooner or later) 
meet with. Through every vicissitude, through ever\^ 
dansfer vou mav move unharmed and become but the 
stronger, for the trial of your strength if you have had 
fixed within your natures the principles of your fathers 
and mothers to which I have endeavored to call your at- 
tention. 

If you have been, are and continue to be true to these, 
the God of righteousness will be with you, my young 
friends, and you must become blessings to your friends 
and ornaments in the social relations of 3^our life. And 
thus alone may your lives become anthems of perfect 
praise to your creator and the best expression of his most 
perfect work. A true man and a true woman. 




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